Theo van der Zee (@theovdzee)

CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla (@finishjoomla)

J & Beyond, May 2011

SEO Myths Busted

Theo van der Zee

- Born 4 December 1985 in The Netherlands

- Msc. Work- and Organizational psychology

- Over 10 years experience in web design

- Over 3 years experience in SEO

- Twitter: @theovdzee

PageRank

Myths

Linking

Up-to-date

KeywordsSuffix

Source: http://www.optify.net/seo/organic-click-through-rate/

“PageRank is a highly important metric”

Myth

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PageRank-hi-res.png

Correlation PageRank to Position

0 0.5 1

No correlation

Perfectcorrelation

PageRank

0.18

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations

Google Toolbar PageRank Updates

Source: http://www.thenewsinn.com/next-google-page-rank-update-2011-history.html

• January 2011

• April 2010

• December 2009

• October 2009

• May 2009

• April 2009

• December 2008

• September 2008

• July 2008

• April 2008

• January 2008

• October 2007

An imprecise metric

4 5

PR 4 PR 4

“Our PageRank has dropped in the last PageRank update!

Now what?”

“I don’t know, sue Google in court?”

Better metrics than PageRank

• Number of customers

• Conversion rate

• Daily revenue per item

• Inlinking root domains

• Keywords sending visitors

PageRank is not important

“[…] many site owners seem to think

[PageRank] is the most important metric for

them to track, which is simply not true.”

-- Google Employee Susan Moskwa

Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48

“Linking out to other websites is bad”

Myth

What does Google say?

“In the same way that Google trusts sites

less when they link to spammy sites or bad

neighborhoods, parts of our system

encourage links to good sites”.

-- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1_rio_de_janeiro_slum_2010.JPG

Source: http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/

Spammy comments

Rel=“nofollow”

<a rel=“nofollow” href=“http://www.joomla.org>No link value passed</a>

“Trading links will increase rankings”

Myth

Source: http://www.blog.organicapex.com/reciprocal-link/

Reciprocal links

3-way reciprocal link

A

BC

Important aspects of a link

<a href=“http://www.joomla.org>This is the anchor text</a>

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Links in content > Links outside content

“Using a suffix will make your pages rank better”

Myth

.html

http://www.example.org/index.html

.php

.exe

.cgi.asp

What the big boys are doing

http://www.zappos.com/teva-mush-ii-island-navy

http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Peter-Gray/dp/1429219475/

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/evangelizing-a-datadriven-culture

“A regularly updated webpage ranks higher”

Myth

The long tail

Source: http://www.elliance.com/aha/infographics/long-tail-seo.aspx

What about you?

“Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

Myth

There he is again...

“[...] Google does not use the keywords

meta tag in our web search”

-- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

“I hope this clarifies that the keywords

meta tag is not something that you need

to worry about, or at least not in Google.”

Entering the keywords

Joomla! Administrator → Global Configuration → Site

Meta description as shown in Google

Meta title

Meta description

Extract meta keywords from page source

What did we learn?

• Stop obsessing over PageRank

• Link out to quality websites, don't link to bad neighborhoods

• Use rel="nofollow" to stop the link juice

• Handle reciprocal links with care

• Don't use a suffix in your URL

• Add new quality content on a regular basis

• Stop entering meta keywords, start using them as a research tool

Questions?

Coupon code

JAB11– 20% discount on all our products

– Valid until 2 weeks from now

– 50 coupons available

Theo van der Zee

theo@finishjoomla.com

Twitter: @finishjoomla